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It Is Probably Safe To Say That Over A Long Period Of Time, Political Morality Has Been As High As Business Morality.

-Henry Steele Commager

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It Is Probably Safe

Henry Steele Commager

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It Is Probably Safe To Say That Over A Long Period Of Time, Political Morality Has Been As High As Business Morality.

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Freedom Is Not A Luxury That We Can Indulge In When At Last We Have Security And Prosperity And Enlightenment; It Is, Rather, Antecedent To All Of These, For Without It We Can Have Neither Security Nor Prosperity Nor Enlightenment.

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The Greatest Danger That Threatens Us Is Neither Heterodox Thought Nor Orthodox Thought, But The Absence Of Thought.

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In The Long Run [censorship] Will Create A Generation Incapable Of Appreciating The Difference Between Independence Of Thought And Subservience.

To Yearn For A Single, And Usually Simple, Explanation Of The Chaotic Materials Of The Past, To Search For A Single Thread In That Most Tangled Of All Skeins, Is A Sign Of Immaturity.

It Seems Fair To Say That While The Moral Standards Of The Nineteenth Century Persisted Almost Unchanged Into The Twentieth, Moral Practices Changed Sharply, And That Though The Standards Of The Nineteenth Century Persisted The Institutions That Had Sustained Them And The Sanctions That Had Enforced Them Lost Influence And Authority.

The American People...have A Stake In Non-conformity. For They Know That The American Genius Is Non-conformist.

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Whether History Will Judge This War To Be Different Or Not We Cannot Say. But This We Can Say With Certainty: A Government And A Society That Silences Those Who Dissent Is One That Has Lost Its Way.

It Is Sobering To Recall That Though The Japanese Relocation Program, Carried Through At Such Incalculable Cost In Misery And Tragedy, Was Justified On The Ground That The Japanese Were Potentially Disloyal, The Record Does Not Disclose A Single Case Of Japanese Disloyalty Or Sabotage During The Whole War.

The Justification And The Purpose Of Freedom Of Speech Is Not To Indulge Those Who Want To Speak Their Minds. It Is To Prevent Error And Discover Truth. There May Be Other Ways Of Detecting Error And Discovering Truth Than That Of Free Discussion, But So Far We Have Not Found Them.

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The Greatest Danger We Face Is Not Any Particular Kind Of Thought. The Greatest Danger We Face Is Absence Of Thought.

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It Is Probably Safe To Say That Over A Long Period Of Time, Political Morality Has Been As High As Business Morality.

We Cannot Have A Society Half Slave And Half Free; Nor Can We Have Thought Half Slave And Half Free. If We Create An Atmosphere In Which Men Fear To Think Independently, Inquire Fearlessly, Express Themselves Freely, We Will In The End Create The Kind Of Society In Which Men No Longer Care To Think Independently Or To Inquire Fearlessly.

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The Bill Of Rights Was Not Written To Protect Governments From Trouble. It Was Written Precisely To Give The People The Constitutional Means To Cause Trouble For Governments They No Longer Trusted.

The Decision For Complete Religious Freedom And For Separation Of Church And State In The Eyes Of The Rest Of The World Was Perhaps The Most Important Decision Reached In The New World. Everywhere In The Western World Of The 18th Century, Church And State Were One; And Everywhere The State Maintained An Established Church And Tried To Force Conformity To Its Dogma.

The Americans Who Framed Our Constitution Felt That Without Freedom Of Religion No Other Freedom Counted.

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